Secular Ethics: Examining and Combating Moral Misconceptions About Atheists, Agnostics, and the Religiously Unaffiliated

Americans maintain more unfavorable attitudes toward atheists than any other religious group. Simultaneously, the United States is becoming more secular. In 2024, approximately 28% of U.S. adults identified as atheists, agnostics, or otherwise religiously unaffiliated. There is widespread suspicion that atheists and agnostics are less moral than theists. This bias impacts everything from their relationships, electability, and job prospects to their safety and legal outcomes. Given the pervasiveness of moral mistrust of secular people and the growth of secularization in recent decades, there is a real need to combat secular bias. Studies about how the masses feel about the secular minority have been conducted for decades. However, secular voices have been lacking in most existing research, which is why I conducted qualitative research via in-depth interviews asking atheists, agnostics, and religiously unaffiliated people about their experience with biased assumptions about being immoral, what their moral beliefs are, and how these moral beliefs impact their actions. The primary purpose of this research is to help readers combat biased assumptions that the secular minority is amoral.